Smallbone Deceased

‌Chapter Four —Wednesday Evening— A Contract Is Entered Into

A contract is sometimes described as being uberrimae fidei. This is not a term which has ever received exclusive definition but it signifies that the contract is one of those—a contract of insurance is the commonest example—in which both parties are under an obligation to make the fullest disclosure of a relevant circumstance.

I

“Blast!” said the Assistant Commissioner.

“Yes, sir,” said Chief Inspector Hazlerigg.

“It’s damned inconvenient.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I particularly don’t want to take you off your regular work”—he meant Inspector Hazlerigg’s permanent Black Market assignment—“but I don’t see what I can do. With Aspinall and Hervey in Lancashire looking for that damned maniac and Cass in Paris; and now Pannel has to go and crock himself.”

“I expect I can manage it, sir. Pickup can do my job here…” But there was more to be said, and both men knew it.

“Look here,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “I think I’d better give you a quick outline, and then you’ll see how—well, never mind that. I won’t start by prejudicing you. Now. At eleven o’clock this morning a partner in this firm of solicitors—what’s their name?—Horniman, Birley and Craine, opened one of their deed boxes. The box was supposed to contain papers relating to a trust. What they found in it was one of the trustees. Name of Smallbone—Marcus Smallbone—very dead.”

He paused: then added inconsequentially: “The late senior partner in that firm was Abel Horniman. Friend of the Commissioner.”

“Wasn’t he the chairman of a committee on Criminal Law Revision?”

“That’s the man. Quite a leading light in the Law Society, and between you and me pretty widely tipped for the next Honours List. His name was a big one in legal circles and he was beginning”—the Assistant Commissioner, though he didn’t know it, was here paraphrasing Mr. Birley—“he was beginning to be a bit of a public figure, too.”

“But if he’s dead, sir,” said Hazlerigg cautiously, “I can’t quite see how—”

“He died about four weeks ago,” said the Assistant Commissioner, “of angina. He’d been ill for some time. I think it would be fair to say that he knew he was booked. His doctor had told him as much.”

“I see, sir.”

“Our pathologist’s first opinion,” went on the Assistant Commissioner, with elaborate casualness, “is that Smallbone had been dead for at least six weeks—possibly eight—maybe ten.”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg. “Yes, I see.”

“Abel Horniman and Marcus Smallbone were fellow trustees—the only trustees—of a very big affair—the Ichabod Stokes Trust. That’s an obvious line on the thing, of course. It’s almost the only direct connection between the two men.”

“And is this trust—I don’t know the proper legal word—is it in order?”

“That’s one of the things you’ll have to find out. Colley—he’s the D.D.I.—I’ll give you his full report in a minute—asked them about it. Apparently it isn’t just as easy as all that. One of the difficulties is that all the papers which might have helped should have been in that deed box—”

“And they were all gone?”

“Every one of them. Good Lord, as it was, there was hardly an inch of room to spare. If Smallbone hadn’t been quite unusually small and slight his body would never have gone in at all.”

“Ten weeks,” said Hazlerigg. “I should have thought they’d have begun to notice him by that time.”

“In the ordinary way, yes,” agreed the Assistant Commissioner. “But these were special boxes, as you’ll see. A rubber sealing-band round the edge and a compressor lid.”

“Rather unusual, sir,” said Hazlerigg. “Whose idea were they?”

“Abel Horniman’s.”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg again. He was already beginning to see the outlines of a simple but unsatisfactory affair with a lot of work and not much kudos. He also realised why the case had been handed to him. The implied compliment added only a little to its attractions.

Another thought struck him.

“What room was this in?”

“Young Horniman’s—that’s the son. He’s taken his father’s place in the firm.”

“And his father’s room, I suppose.”

“Yes. I’ve got the first pictures here.” He opened a folder. “The deed box was kept on a shelf under the window—there—you can see the space it came out of.”

“I take it it was locked.”

“Yes—that was one of the things. They couldn’t find the key. The box was actually opened in the end by their commissionaire. He ‘sprung’ the lock with a hammer, and the lid flew open. Must have been quite a moment.”

Hazlerigg was studying one or two of the reports. Something seemed to have puzzled him. He looked through the photographs again and selected one gruesome close-up which showed the body of Marcus Smallbone as it had lain packed in its metal coffin.

Then he looked again at the statement.

“I can’t quite make out from this,” he said, “who actually identified the body first?”

“I thought it was young Horniman.”

“Not from what it says here. Horniman says that the first time Smallbone’s name was actually mentioned was when Miss Bellbas—she’s one of the typists, I gather—ran out of the room screaming ‘It’s Mr. Smallbone’ and something about the stars foretelling it. Miss Bellbas denies it. She says she had never seen Mr. Smallbone when he was alive so how could she have recognised him when he was dead. Miss Cornel, one of the secretaries, says that she thought Bob Horniman mentioned the name first. Sergeant Cockerill says, No. He doesn’t think anyone actually mentioned the name, but there had been so much speculation about Smallbone’s disappearance that he, for his part, assumed at once that the body must be his.”

“Sounds plausible,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “Why are you making a special point of it…?”

“Well, sir”—Hazlerigg pointed to the photograph—“you see how the body was lying. The face was pushed right down on to the chest. Then again, after eight or ten weeks, I shouldn’t have imagined that anyone could say with certainty—”

“Yes. There may be something there. Bland did the autopsy. Have a word with him and see what he says. Incidentally, I can set your mind at rest on one point. There’s no doubt it was Smallbone. We’ve got very good prints which match up a dozen test samples from his lodgings. The man was a sort of pottery collector, bless him, and has left hundreds of beautiful prints. Colley will tell you about that.”

“Right,” said Hazlerigg. He replaced the photographs and gathered the typewritten sheets of Divisional Detective-Inspector Colley’s report, patting them into a neat bundle, then rose to go.

“There is one thing,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “You may need a bit of expert help. It doesn’t need me to point out to you that there is an obvious line here, and the obvious line is often the right line. On the face of it, there’s only one man who could have done this job. And his motive, when you get to it, is almost certain to be tied up in some legal jiggery-pokery. That’s the logical supposition, anyway. Now would you like me to lend you one of our legal fellows to help you. Just say the word…”

Hazlerigg hesitated. The offer, he knew, was helpfully meant: and yet it had a faint suggestion of dual control which was hateful. However, it was no doubt the sensible course and he had actually opened his mouth to say “Yes” when his eye caught a name on the top of the typescript report.

“May I take it that the offer will be kept open,” he said. “I’d like to start this in the ordinary routine way. I may find myself out of my depth. Quite likely I shall. If so—”

“Certainly,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “Just say the word. By the way,” he added shrewdly, “what was it on that paper that made you change your mind?”

Hazlerigg smiled.

“I saw a name I recognised,” he said. “Here—in the list of recent arrivals at the office.”

“Henry Winegarden Bohun,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “Never heard of him. What is he?”

“Presumably he is a solicitor. He was a statistician. Before that, I believe, an actuary. And at one time almost a doctor.”

“I don’t believe,” said the Assistant Commissioner, “that any normal man could find the time to train for all those professions.”

“Quite so, sir,” said the chief inspector. “No normal man could. Bohun’s not normal. I’ll tell you how I know about him. He happened to be in the same battalion as Sergeant Pollock—you may remember him—”

“The man the Garret crowd killed. He worked with you, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Well, he was a friend of Bohun’s. They were in the same company in North Africa. He told me about Bohun’s peculiarity. If this is the same chap—and heaven knows it’s not a common name—then he might be useful. Particularly if we can be certain that he wasn’t involved—I’ll check on that first, of course.”

“A friend in the enemy’s camp,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “It’s quite a good idea. Only for heaven’s sake don’t be like that mug in the detective story who confides all his best ideas to a friendly sort of character who turns out to be the murderer in Chapter Sixteen.”

II

Bohun was one of the first to leave the office that evening. In view of the fact that he had only joined the firm two days before, and had had no previous ascertainable connection with any member of it, if we except a very distant schoolboy acquaintanceship with Bob Horniman, he had occupied only a few minutes of Inspector Colley’s time.

In common with all the other members of the staff he had had his finger-prints taken.

This was typical of Inspector Colley who was elderly, soured by lack of promotion, and extremely methodical. He knew the necessary moves to a hair, and made them all. His reports were models of conciseness and monuments to a staggering lack of imagination.

However, he was a worker.

In the short time at his disposal he had taken statements from everyone in the office, set his photographers in motion, commissioned a detailed drawing of Bob Horniman’s room and an outline sketch of the whole office, set his finger-print men to work on the room, its walls, its door, its fittings, its approaches and its very varied contents; had taken check sets of prints from all other members of the staff; had dispatched a man to Smallbone’s lodging to obtain prints from there, together with a check set from his landlady; had, in due course, sanctioned the removal of the body for pathological examination and on the strength of the doctor’s preliminary report had divided the personnel into two lists. List One, those who had been with the firm less than a month: Mr. Bohun, Mr. Prince, Mr. Waugh (the cashier), Mrs. Porter and Mr. Flower. Mr. Flower, it might be explained, was none other than Charlie the office-boy. He kept his surname a secret in the office, having suffered from it at school. List Two, the remainder.

He had also contrived to make everyone on both lists feel thoroughly uncomfortable.

“It’s not what he says or does,” as Miss Cornel observed to Anne Mildmay; “it’s his general frightful air of ‘You’re all presumed guilty until you’re proved innocent’.”

Bohun walked quietly home in the dusk, across New Square.

He was thinking of the extraordinary events of the day. He was thinking that shock revealed the oddest traits and flaws in the human character. He was thinking that he was glad he was on List One.

He stepped into Malvern Rents, which is a passage off a turning off Chancery Lane, and turned in at the Rising Sun Restaurant, which, in spite of its pretentious name, was a tiny eating-house, the total furnishing of which consisted of four small tables, a few chairs and a wooden counter with an urn on it. The room, as was usual at this hour of the day, was empty. Bohun paused for a moment at the half-open door behind the counter to shout: “I’m back.”

A muffled echo from the depths seemed to amount to some sort of acknowledgment.

He then pushed on through the second doorway, covered by an army blanket, up two flights of the narrow stairs, and through a second door. He was home.

It was an unexpected room to find in such a house. Originally, no doubt, it had been a large loft or storeroom, belonging perhaps to some scrivener at a time when the focus of the legal world had centred on the east rather than the west of Chancery Lane. It was a big room—quite thirty feet long and about half as wide, and looking surprisingly attractive with its grey fitted carpet, its stripped wooden walls and its carefully arranged lighting. The wall on the right as you came in from the landing, the inner of the long walls, was all books, covered with books, from floor to ceiling and from end to end. There was nothing esoteric about them, no tall folios, no first editions swathed in wash-leather—rather the well-handled tools of a reading man’s trade. Poets, essayists, historians, sets of novels, textbooks, even school books; there must have been more than a thousand of them.

Two formal steel engravings of battle scenes filled the space between the tiny uncurtained windows of the long outer wall. At the far end of the room stood a large electric log fire (there was, of course, no fireplace). Over it hung a portrait in oils of a severe-looking lady. In front of it stood a single leather arm-chair.

Bohun whistled softly to himself as he walked through the room and disappeared into the small annexe which opened off it and which was his sleeping quarters.

When he reappeared he was dressed in corduroy trousers and a khaki shirt, and had a white muffler round his neck. With his plain, serious, rather white face, he looked like some mechanic with a bent for self-improvement, a student of Kant and Schopenhauer, who tended his lathe by day and sharpened his wits of an evening on dead dialecticians.

“Well, Mr. Bohun,” said Mrs. Magoli, descendant of Florentines, owner of the Rising Sun Restaurant, and Bohun’s landlady. “And how are you finding your new office?”

“Thank you,” said Bohun. “I’m liking it very much.”

“Dry as dust, I expect.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Bohun. “We found a trustee in one of the deed boxes today.”

“Lor!” said Mrs. Magoli, who clearly had no idea what a trustee was. “What will you lawyers get up to next? Now what could you fancy for your afters?”

Bohun inspected the table in the middle of the room which Mrs. Magoli had spread with a fair cloth and covered with a number of dishes, backed by a promising looking wicker-covered flask.

“Ham,” he said. “How on earth do you get ham? I didn’t think there was that much ham in London. Pasta schuta. Bread. Butter. Green olives. To add anything else would be sacrilege and profanation—unless you’ve got a little bit of Carmagnola cheese…”

“I thought that’s what you’d be after,” said Mrs. Magoli. “Got some this morning. Shocking price, I don’t like to tell you what it cost.”

“Then don’t,” said Bohun.

“You’ll be the ruin of me,” said Mrs. Magoli complacently.

“Then we will go down together into bankruptcy,” said Bohun, “fortified by the blamelessness of our lives and strengthened by the inspiration of your cooking.”

When Mrs. Magoli had cleared away the last of the dinner, Bohun took a book from the shelves and started to read. He read steadily, reeling in the lines of print with a nice unfettered action. Page after page was turned, until the little clock on the mantelpiece tinkled out eleven: whereupon Bohun closed the book, marking the place with a slip of white paper on which he scribbled a note. Then he got to his feet and looked out of the window, stooping his height a little to get a view of the skyline over the gable opposite.

The sky was clear, and the night warm for mid-April.

Bohun went back into his bedroom and returned carrying an old raincoat, turned out the fire and the light and went quietly downstairs. A few minutes later he was in Holborn, boarding a late bus, going east.

It was half a dozen fare-stages beyond Aldgate Pump before he alighted. Thereafter he turned south, towards the river, following his nose.

The public houses were long since closed and the only lights which showed were from one or two little all-night cafés. Bohun seemed to know where he was going. He left even these rare lights behind him as he turned down a side street. He was in the factory and warehouse area now, and the street along which he was walking was lined with heavy double doors, steel-roller covered vanways alternating with hoardings.

After a hundred yards he turned down an alleyway which came to a dead end in an ugly square yellow-brick building. Lights were showing in one or two of the windows and Bohun knocked. The front door was unlocked and he went in without waiting for an answer.

The room into which he turned was some sort of office. A gas-fire burned in the grate, and at a table a small bald middle-aged man was seated drinking cocoa out of a large mug.

“Good evening, ’Enery,” said the bald man. His voice declared that he had been born and bred within striking distance of Bow bells. “I thought I reckernised your fairy plates. ’Elp yerself to a cupper.”

“Thanks,” said Henry. “Anything doing tonight?”

“Not tonight, son. You mighter used the blower and saved yerself a journey.”

“That’s all right,” said Henry. “I like the exercise. When’s the next job coming along?”

“I can fitcher in next week, most probable. Peters need a pair for their new place.”

“Peters—isn’t that whisky?”

“Wines and sperrits.”

“That’s apt to be a bit rough, isn’t it?” said Bohun. “I’m not looking for trouble, you know. A quiet life is all I want.”

“Quiet,” said the little man. “It’ll be quiet as a fevver bed. Peters are all right. Very scientific. All the fixings.”

“All right,” said Bohun. “I’ll try anything once. Give me a ring nearer the time. How have you been keeping? How are the pigeons?…”

“Pigeons… There’s no money left in our fevvered friends—take pigs…”

It was an hour and more before Bohun finally set out again into the night. The last bus had long gone to its garage and the streets were empty. He faced the prospect of the walk with equanimity. Walking in the country bored him, but London he loved, and most of all he loved it at night. The shuttered warehouses, the silent streets of offices. The grave, cloaked policemen, the occasional hunting cat. The death of one day’s life.

His long legs carried him steadily westward.

Three o’clock was striking from Lincoln’s Inn Chapel when he turned once more into Malvern Rents.

As he turned his key in the door he stopped in some surprise. Ten yards down, opposite the entrance of the narrow passage, he noticed the rear light of a car. This in itself was unusual at that time of night, but it was not all. Looking up from where he stood he saw that there was a light in his room.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Bohun. He shut the shop door quietly and went upstairs.

The thickset man who got up as he came in, said: “I’m sorry to disturb you at such an unorthodox hour, Mr. Bohun. Your landlady gave me permission to make myself at home till you came back.”

He might have been a farmer, with his red face, his heavy build and his hardworn tweed suit. He might have been a soldier in mufti. The hand which he held out to Bohun had the plumping muscles behind the fingers which meant that the owner used his hands as well as his head. The only remarkable thing about this generally unremarkable person was his eyes, which were grey, with the cold grey of the North Sea.

“My name’s Hazlerigg,” went on the newcomer. “I’m from Scotland Yard.”

Bohun had recognised the police car and managed not to look too shaken. The next remark, however, did surprise him.

“I believe you knew Bobby Pollock,” said Hazlerigg.

“Lord, yes,” said Bohun. “Won’t you sit down. Bobby and I were second loots in the Rum Runners. We were in Africa and Italy together. I heard—didn’t he get killed?”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg. “I had the pleasure of hanging both the responsible parties,” he added.

“I’m glad,” said Bohun. “Bobby was a first-rater. I believe he broke every regulation known to officialdom to get into the army.”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg. “He told me a lot about you too.”

“Well, I expect you know the worst. About my disability, you mean.”

“I should hesitate to describe para-insomnia as a disability,” said Hazlerigg, “although I know the army regarded it as such.”

“I don’t think that anyone really knows very much about it,” said Bohun, “or that’s the impression I’ve got from talking to a number of different doctors.”

“It’s true, then, that you never sleep more than two hours a night.”

“Two hours is a good night,” said Bohun. “Ninety minutes is about the average.”

“And you don’t suffer any ill effects—excuse me. It’s bad taste, I know, asking questions like that, only I was interested when Pollock told me.”

“It doesn’t make me feel tired, if that’s what you mean,” said Bohun. “It isn’t straightforward insomnia, you know—not as the term is usually understood. The only detail on which the medical profession are at all agreed is that some day I may drop down dead in the street. But what day—or what street—they can’t say.”

“I can’t do better,” said Hazlerigg, “than quote Sergeant Pollock. He said some nice things about you as an infantry officer, then he added, ‘Of course, he was God’s gift to the staff. Imagine a G.S.O. who could work indefinitely for twenty-two hours a day!’ I gather that an officious M.O. tumbled to it in the end and the net result was that you were boarded out.”

“Once they knew about the para-insomnia I don’t think they had any option.”

“I should have thought the most difficult thing was filling in the spare time.”

“Oh, I do a good deal of reading,” said Bohun. “It’s useful, too, when I’m taking an exam. And I do a good deal of walking about the streets. And sometimes I get a job.”

“A job?”

“As night watchman. I combined most of my reading for my Law Finals with a night watchman’s job for the Apex Shipping Company. Believe it or not, I was actually reading the sections in Kenny on ‘Robbery with Violence’ when I was knocked out by Syd Seligman, the strong-arm man for one of the—”

“I know Syd,” said Inspector Hazlerigg. “I helped to send him down for a seven last month. Well, now…”

“The preliminaries are now concluded,” thought Bohun. “Seconds out of the ring. Time!”

“I’ve got a proposal to put to you. I don’t know if you’ll think it’s a good one or not…” Shortly he laid before Bohun the idea which he had already put to the Assistant Commissioner and the facts on which it was based.

“We might as well face it at once,” he went on. “Almost the only person who could and would have killed Smallbone is your late senior partner, Abel Horniman. If you’re inclined to look anywhere else for a likely candidate just ask yourself how anyone else could have got the body into the room unobserved, and opened the box—of which only Abel had the key. For Abel himself, the box was the obvious place to put a body. He knew he was dying. He only needed a few weeks’ grace—a few months at the most. But for anyone else, the idea was madness.”

“Yes,” said Bohun. “Of course. When you put it like that it seems obvious enough… But why?”

“That’s where you come in,” said Hazlerigg. “Again, we’ll start with the obvious solution. You’d be surprised how often it’s the right one. Abel Horniman and Marcus Smallbone were fellow trustees. I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it, but I realise this much. They had joint control of a very large sum of money. It might be more accurate to say that Horniman had control of it. He was the professional. One would expect Smallbone to do what he was told—sign on the dotted line and so on.”

“I don’t think,” said Bohun slowly, “that Smallbone was quite that sort of man.”

“I don’t expect he was,” said Hazlerigg. “That’s why he’s dead, you know. It’s so obvious that it must be so. Some swindle was going on. I don’t mean that it was an easy swindle or an obvious swindle. Nothing that an outsider could spot. But Smallbone wasn’t an outsider. The thing had to be put up to him—to a limited extent. And he just happened to spot the rabbit in the conjurer’s hat.”

“So the conjurer popped him into his disappearing cabinet.”

“Yes. Think of Horniman’s position. Think of the temptation. On the one hand, disgrace, the breaking down of a life’s work—probably jail. On the other hand—he could ‘die respectit’, as the Scots say. Once he was dead it wouldn’t matter. It was so easy. Into the box with the body, lose the key, sit tight. Even if it went wrong, what matter. The hangman would have to get the deuce of a move on if he wanted to race the angina. How many people, I wonder, would commit murder if they knew they were going to die anyway. And Smallbone was such an unimportant, such an insignificant creature. How dared he imperil the great Horniman tradition, cast doubts on the Horniman legend, besmear the great Horniman name. No, no. Into the box with him.”

“I see,” said Bohun. “How are you going to prove all this?”

“That’s it,” said Hazlerigg. “We shall have to find out what’s wrong with this trust.”

“Well,” said Bohun, “I expect I could help you if you’re keen on the idea. But surely an accountant or an auditor could do it better than me. It’ll just be routine.”

“I wonder.” Hazlerigg suddenly got up. He strolled across to the window. The first light of dawn was coming up. The roofs opposite showed blacker against the faintest greying of the dark.

“It may not be as simple as all that,” he said. “Anyway, I’d like your help if I may have it.”

“Of course,” said Bohun.

“And then again, we’ve always got to face the possibility that it may not have been Abel Horniman. That is going to open up quite a wide field of speculation.”

“List Two,” said Bohun.

“Ah! You’ve seen the testament according to Colley. I’m afraid his classification may not be as exhaustive as it seems—”

“You mean, someone who came after?…”

“On the contrary—someone who was there, but has now left.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose that’s possible,” said Bohun slowly. “I hadn’t thought of it. I had no predecessor. My typist, Mrs. Porter, came when I did; I mean, she didn’t replace anyone. The Common Law clerk, Mr. Prince, took the place of another old boy who’d been umpteen years with the firm. But he—the other one, I mean—left months ago. Just after Christmas. I believe they had some trouble over finding a replacement. You don’t get Common Law clerks easily. Then there’s the cashier—we had a cashier, before, a Mr. Clark—he’s well in the running, I suppose. He only left three weeks ago.”

“Colley mentions him in his report,” said Hazlerigg. “But he’s out for another reason. He couldn’t have done it, he was a last war casualty. He only had one hand.”

“And why does that mean he couldn’t have killed Smallbone?” said Bohun quietly.

“I quite forgot,” said Hazlerigg. “You don’t know how he was killed.”

“I don’t,” said Bohun steadily, “and I suggest,” he added, “that if you’re going to trust me you don’t set traps for me.”

Hazlerigg had the grace to blush. “Just second nature,” he said, and added: “No. It would have been quite impossible. Smallbone was strangled with picture wire. Definitely a two-handed job.”